“Thing is, Andy,” Rob went on, “yours truly passed out last night on the couch in the library. Not that you’d have known that, because you went up so early. Dave too, when I think about it. Anyway, so there was I passed out on the couch and then about one, maybe two, I wake up. It’s pitch-black so I can’t see anything, but I’m hearing these noises. Can you guess what it was? No? Don’t want to take a guess, a wild stab in the dark?”
I heard the front door slam.
“Why don’t you shut your fucking mouth?”
“Rob, what are you talking about?” Alice had gotten to her feet.
For a moment, the impish mask slipped and Rob looked almost sad. “Sorry, sis,” he said. “But better you find out now than later. Better you know him for what he is.”
David still didn’t say anything. His eyes followed Rob. He didn’t even look particularly surprised.
Turning back to me, Rob went on. “It was a couple, Andy. Two people. Fucking. At it. Hammer and tongs. On my parents’ best Persian rug. Sixteen bedrooms to choose from—”
Marcus came in. He had his boots on and they were caked in snow.
“Shut up, Rob. Just shut up!” And I made a move toward him like I was going to cover his mouth with my hands and stop the words from coming out.
“Just in time, Marcus. We’re reaching the denouement! I’m about to reveal … where’s Em? She should be here for this too really. I’m just about to tell you how I caught Andy and David fucking last night.”
“Em’s outside.” There was something wrong with Marcus’s face. He didn’t look right, or sound right for that matter. “Em’s out there.” He looked at each of us in appeal. “She’s out in the snow. I’m pretty certain—” and his face collapsed, collapsed unbearably. “I think Em’s dead.”
* * *
She was not, as Mortimer had been, in the rose garden. She was at the end of the drive, near but not quite at the road. Later the police would ask how many sets of footprints there had been in the snow. Were there two? Or three? Or more even? I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell them. My gaze was fixed on the dark heap in the snow up by the gate. At some point, I started running. I got there first, but the others were there soon after, all apart from Marcus and Peter. I don’t think Marcus ran at all. He was clutching Peter’s arm and coming up over the snow like an old man afraid of falling and breaking every bone he had.
Em was lying on her back. Her coat was open. She had on her nightie—a Patti Smith T-shirt I knew she wore in bed—and her jeans and boots. I took up her hand, but there was no life in it.
“That’s my coat,” I said. “Why’s she got my coat on?”
“I’m not a doctor,” Zack was saying. His voice had a rising intonation as though one of us was insisting he was. “I’m not a doctor but I think she’s dead.”
But how could she be dead?
I heard myself saying her name, over and over. I heard myself crying. Not normal crying, something much worse. It was like coming apart.
Priss had called an ambulance straightaway, but it took a long time to come. There had been an accident on the M4 out by Junction 16 and all across the region, people were slipping over on pavements and breaking arms, elbows, collarbones, losing control of their cars and ending up beached on roundabouts or in ditches. When it finally swung up the drive in the wake of a police car, it felt like an insult. They confirmed what we knew. No signs of life.
“Aren’t you going to do anything? Shock her or something? I mean it can’t hurt, can it? Do something! Do something!” Marcus’s face was liverish. He looked big and angry and I could see the police sizing him up. Peter moved to stand between him and the medics.
On TV, people would often seem dead for minutes—a week even, between episodes—only to revive at the last possible moment.
“She’s not even hurt,” I said. And it was true. Em had no injuries that I could see. Only when they moved her, there was a pink patch, not big, no pool of blood or anything, on one of the stone markers that bordered the drive.
“You need to all go inside now with my colleague.” It was one of the police, a female officer. Another car was arriving, unmarked, with two men inside. Soon, they’d be joined by a photographer and the forensics officers. She turned to me. “Listen, love, you’ve only got your socks on. You’ll catch your death.”
But it was Em who had caught her death, caught the death I had called up, the one I had summoned from beneath the ice, and there was no bringing her back from it.
* * *
We were interviewed. First at the house, again at the station. I told the police how I knew Em and for how long, how we’d come to be there, and what we had been doing and how I knew all the others. They wanted to know about the game and when I had last seen Em, and what time I’d gone to bed and where and with whom.
“You say it was about ten-thirty p.m.?”
“Maybe nearer eleven, but I was up in the night. I came downstairs.”
“Time?”
“About one.”
“And did you see Emma?”
“No.”
“Why did you come downstairs?”
“I wanted the diamonds, the one we used for the game.”
“The necklace David Graves had won.”
“He had left them on the mantelpiece, but I wanted them.”
“And did you see anyone?”
“I saw David.”
“And how long were you downstairs.”
“Perhaps an hour…”
I told them. It was all going to come out anyway.
“And you’re in a relationship with Marcus Fisher?”
“Yes.”
“And what about Emma?”
“What about her?”
“Was she in a relationship with anyone?”
“No.”
“She had not fought with anyone? She wasn’t angry with anyone as far as you knew? There wasn’t a lover’s quarrel?”
“No,” I said. “Em wasn’t in love with anyone.”
A week or so later, I was called back. It was the same two detectives. They were interested in the footprints. It was like a puzzle, I could see that. They had photographs of the drive, color shots and some black and whites.
“Bit arty,” I said. I felt ill, like a lifetime of eating rotten things had caught up with me. There was one of the house, a black and white. The door was open. It looked like a maw. Black door and windows and everything bleached and unutterably sinister, like a lunatic park and all the love I’d ever felt for it was a knife twisting in my heart.
Some clever soul had painted each set of footprints a different color. Detectives Tailor and Vincent showed me various photos. There was one of the area around Em’s body. You could just see Em’s boot in the top corner. The snow was all mushed up from where we had kneeled over her. There were lots of pictures of the footprints in the snow leading to and from the house. One of the detectives, Vincent, seemed to think there was an extra set. Em had gone out, but not come back. Marcus has gone out once and found her, and then come back to fetch us, then he had gone out and eventually back again. The rest of us had gone out and back once. An extra set—boot prints. They were the same pair that Zack had been wearing, one of the pairs left by the door.